Daniel Fox: Dragon in Chains
Feb. 12th, 2009 09:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustDisclosure / name-dropping: Daniel Fox is a friend, not just here on LJ, under the name ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
moshui, but, in real life too, under his own name, which is not, in fact, Daniel Fox. So if I didn't like Dragon in Chains, I wouldn't be writing about it here. But then, I read plenty of books that I don't write about here, and very few books that I like one half as much as Dragon in Chains.
Back at the beginning of this millennium, Daniel Fox had the opportunity to travel to Taiwan. He loved it, he wanted to go back, he wanted to write books about it - and eventually he did both of those things, he made a second visit and with Dragon in Chains he has begun to write 'Moshui - the Books of Stone and Water' about an island on the very edge of a huge empire, but an island which holds the heart of that empire, because it is the place the jade comes from. It is not the book that someone Taiwanese would write, or someone from the mainland of China, it is the book of a Westerner who has fallen in love with the place - and who has gone away and done a lot of hard work, read a lot of history and even tried to learn the language. The result is not a piece of chinoiserie, in the eighteenth century style, it's more like one of those Chinese water colours, all blue sea dotted with tiny boats and fishermen people and those implausible craggy islands. I wanted a map, not because I felt it needed a Standard Issue Fantasy MapTM but for the sheer pleasure of how it would look.
Although the story takes place on the island of Taishu, the nearest coast of the mainland and the waters between them, it bears the weight of the whole vast expanse of the empire, across which the boy emperor has flown in disarray with the rebel generals at his heels. It's a huge canvas, and it's filled with a cast of thousands - well, not literally thousands, but there are a substantial number of characters whose point of view we share, and more whose fate we care about. They all have their own stories and their own desires - perhaps not so much their own voices, because Daniel Fox is a writer who cares about style, and it's his voice that tells the story, his rich, beautiful, language which unfolds the horrific events that happen to the characters. Of course, the worst things that happen to them are each other: the emperor, the rightful heir, is a charming and sympathetic character, but the mayhem and devastation caused by his passage are appalling. Dragon in Chains is large enough to encompass both the struggle to control the empire, and the knowledge that for the farmers and the townspeople, once the armies are marching through it doesn't really matter which army finds you first. The pirates - for, yes, there are pirates! - are also singularly unpleasant, which seems only proper in a pirate. Do I need to say that there's a dragon, too, a real and not just figurative dragon? A chained dragon?
Perhaps I do; yet I'm very reluctant to give away any of what happens in this book. Google it, and you will find 'reviews' which contain lavish quantities of plot summary (including one which does not stop short of telling you how the book ends, although fortunately, being a long book and a short review, it doesn't go into detail). I dislike that approach at the best of times, and in this book more than most I found great pleasure not just in the twists of the plot, but also in the gradual realisation of where the magic lies and what it does, in those shifts where a new piece of information makes you suddenly hear what you've been told all along. So I'd be sorry to deny anyone else that pleasure. I'll say just this much: how does it end? Magnificently, unexpectedly, and with a twist which left me desperate to read the next instalment!
Daniel Fox's web site, with an extract from Dragon in Chains.
moshui, but, in real life too, under his own name, which is not, in fact, Daniel Fox. So if I didn't like Dragon in Chains, I wouldn't be writing about it here. But then, I read plenty of books that I don't write about here, and very few books that I like one half as much as Dragon in Chains.Back at the beginning of this millennium, Daniel Fox had the opportunity to travel to Taiwan. He loved it, he wanted to go back, he wanted to write books about it - and eventually he did both of those things, he made a second visit and with Dragon in Chains he has begun to write 'Moshui - the Books of Stone and Water' about an island on the very edge of a huge empire, but an island which holds the heart of that empire, because it is the place the jade comes from. It is not the book that someone Taiwanese would write, or someone from the mainland of China, it is the book of a Westerner who has fallen in love with the place - and who has gone away and done a lot of hard work, read a lot of history and even tried to learn the language. The result is not a piece of chinoiserie, in the eighteenth century style, it's more like one of those Chinese water colours, all blue sea dotted with tiny boats and fishermen people and those implausible craggy islands. I wanted a map, not because I felt it needed a Standard Issue Fantasy MapTM but for the sheer pleasure of how it would look.
Although the story takes place on the island of Taishu, the nearest coast of the mainland and the waters between them, it bears the weight of the whole vast expanse of the empire, across which the boy emperor has flown in disarray with the rebel generals at his heels. It's a huge canvas, and it's filled with a cast of thousands - well, not literally thousands, but there are a substantial number of characters whose point of view we share, and more whose fate we care about. They all have their own stories and their own desires - perhaps not so much their own voices, because Daniel Fox is a writer who cares about style, and it's his voice that tells the story, his rich, beautiful, language which unfolds the horrific events that happen to the characters. Of course, the worst things that happen to them are each other: the emperor, the rightful heir, is a charming and sympathetic character, but the mayhem and devastation caused by his passage are appalling. Dragon in Chains is large enough to encompass both the struggle to control the empire, and the knowledge that for the farmers and the townspeople, once the armies are marching through it doesn't really matter which army finds you first. The pirates - for, yes, there are pirates! - are also singularly unpleasant, which seems only proper in a pirate. Do I need to say that there's a dragon, too, a real and not just figurative dragon? A chained dragon?
Perhaps I do; yet I'm very reluctant to give away any of what happens in this book. Google it, and you will find 'reviews' which contain lavish quantities of plot summary (including one which does not stop short of telling you how the book ends, although fortunately, being a long book and a short review, it doesn't go into detail). I dislike that approach at the best of times, and in this book more than most I found great pleasure not just in the twists of the plot, but also in the gradual realisation of where the magic lies and what it does, in those shifts where a new piece of information makes you suddenly hear what you've been told all along. So I'd be sorry to deny anyone else that pleasure. I'll say just this much: how does it end? Magnificently, unexpectedly, and with a twist which left me desperate to read the next instalment!
Daniel Fox's web site, with an extract from Dragon in Chains.
